Baseball Twitter's most interesting account has never suffered an original thought, and it never will, barring an extinction-level threat to humanity. There's good reason for this: ee gammings lacks a brain, heart, soul, and everything else humans rent from their maker. The only thing loaned to gammings is its name: an amalgam of baseball scribe Peter Gammons and poet ee cummings. So, what is gammings? An "artificial intelligence software which cannot quite decide between a career in MLB rumormonging or poetry," according to its Twitter bio.

Gammings is, by "self"-definition, a bot. Yet in a day and age where Twitter bots are know for nefarious usage, gammings is developing a following due to its chance absurdity and whimsy.

In a sense, gammings was born in 2002, four years before Twitter launched. Ken Arneson, now a semi-retired web programmer and baseball blogger, disagreed with a hypothesis posed by a Baseball Think Factory (nee Primer) user who asserted that Gammons' rumors were as valuable as those randomly assembled -- or not. He spun code that swapped players' and teams' names in Gammons' reports without insight, access, or prejudice. The result was a whole lot of nothing. "The real Gammons rumors had plausibility: the teams were looking for something specific, and the players in the rumors fit those needs," Arneson told CBS Sports. "Just inserting other names into real trade rumors was mostly boring and uninteresting."

Arneson discovered that while changing names randomly provided no entertainment value, the same was not true when he altered nouns and adverbs. He beefed up the code then flipped a switch, unleashed a mad cackle and released the "Random Diamond Notes" generator to the world in February 2003. The generator -- essentially mad libs meets Gammons' signature ESPN column -- remains operational, and serves as the big sibling to the gammings account.

The generator and the gammings account work the same way, albeit with the latter requiring a stripped-down approach due to Twitter's limitations. Every tweet is crafted from a series of lists: there's one for teams, for players, for executives, even for sentence structures. Varying syntax and form gives gammings a dynamic, human-like feel that belies its bot-like reality. The result is that sometimes gammings tweets like, well, Gammons or cummings, and other teams like a text-prompt game gone awry.

The French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre once wrote, "The more I see and the more I observe, the more does this Intelligence shine behind the mystery of things." In gammings' case, the Intelligence in question -- the one that powers the account with interesting structure and verbiage -- is little more than Arneson when he has nothing better to do. "When I first released the Diamond Notes Generator, it had about 300 possible different basic sentence structures to pull from," he said. "Now there are thousands, because when I'm bored, instead of playing a video game or something, I'll often just go in and add a few things here and there, and it's just built up over the past 14 years."

Knowing the mechanics of how something works isn't the same as knowing why it works. Nearly 700 people, including a former major league general manager, follow gammings despite the account promising little more than lottery-generated babble. Gammings' increasing popularity is about more than tweets: it exists to humor and entertain, sure, but also, perhaps to offer a meta commentary on rumormongering and baseball itself. Really.

The baseball rumor game has changed since Arneson constructed the generator. Hearsay is more ubiquitous than ever and the barrier to entry is lower than ever. It's no longer the chosen few, Gammons and his ilk, who are presumed to be sourced up. Nowadays, anyone can break a story -- anyone, and yes, anything. Given enough time, gammings is certain to string together a tweet that "predicts" a transaction before it occurs. When that happens, everyone will know it was a fluke. But, on some level, will wish it wasn't. The difference between gammings and its average follower is simple: only one is human.

"We read and we think and we process information in very set, predictable ways because those ways make it easier for us; our brains are full of shortcuts, intuition. We have to, because otherwise there wouldn't be time to process anything," said Patrick Dubuque, a writer and the editor of Baseball Prospectus' "Short Relief" column. "Baseball doubles down on this kind of systemic thinking, with all these rules and constraints. A lot of humor can be derived from just how silly and arbitrary these habits are, but it's a very difficult thing, a thing that separates truly great comedians, in their ability to see into the nature of these patterns."

In a respect, gammings is an everlasting baseball game that is playing out tweet by tweet. It entertains and provides a much-needed diversion with in-built detachment; gammings is a bot much in the way that baseball is simply a sport. The unpredictability keeps things fresh, and though nobody knows what's next, the scent of something special always lingers in the air. As anyone who has followed a losing season before knows, that's more than enough to justify awareness and engagement -- even through the randomness and nonsense of it all.

"For a sport and a culture as repetitive and traditional as baseball, weird accounts become subversive, if not directly antagonistic," Dubuque said. "It just provides a more colorful tapestry from which to enjoy the game. The more variety, the better."